Navigation

This hybrid panel will address the growing rapprochement between anthropology and art through the practice of "artistic research." This is especially evident in how anthropologists are drawing upon experimental artistic practices and methods, on the one hand, and on the other, how art departments have increasingly incorporated the language of making, and artistic research into their curriculums. Dr. Ben Spatz [https://pure.hud.ac.uk/en/persons/ben-spatz] will be our discussant. The concept of “making” in itself has created a continuum between art-making (in all media /modalities) and writing, such as Parsons first year curriculum describing writing as a form of making. How has the design area been transformed? Where exactly does this humanist intellectualism lead us? As exciting as these crossovers might be, what are the pitfalls, problematics and advantages, insights involved? What impact has this on social practice methods? How has this turn effected not just the self-reflection of the disciplines themselves, but also the ethical aspects of these new research projects and practices? Most especially in its most popularized form: ethnography? How can we read Hal Foster’s 1995 essay “The Artist as Ethnographer?” today? In this essay Foster stated his doubts about the praxology combining art-making and research. But now almost three decades later what has changed or stayed the same? How has anthropology influenced or re-shaped the field of art? Is artistic research only a reaction to the institutionalization of the arts, a self-defense mechanism as a field that needs to justify itself as scholarship, a discipline worthy of PhD’s?